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R0b0t1
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Oil is always going to decline, so that dude's argument is pretty much debased... Although it's more of a reciting of facts paper.
[Edited on 21-2-2010 by R0b0t1]
We've been doing so much with so little for so long, we can do everything with nothing in no time at all.
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chief
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Oil always declining ... ; that's not a argument but a commonplace.
The point is: Everybody thinks if something is "green" or labeled so he can defend it and automagically be in the right, no matter what nonsense it
means.
Thats how politics gets excuses for the high price: They don't have to admit for the inflation and other eeconomic causes, but can blame everything on
the ominous "peak oil" ...
==> and enough former hippies, leftists etc. will defend it, since they are used to argue on what seems to be the same line ...
Meanwhile since at least a decade all the environment-stuff is beeing abused for anything, only not for the better of humanity.
=====================
Any good scienceman should always look behind the curtains, which in this case yields: Wallstreet was broke, baksters shorted oil (eg. JP.Morgan and
Goldman sucks were involved), they manipulated the prices (via paper/derivative-trading) and told the public the "peak ..."-fairytale.
[Edited on 21-2-2010 by chief]
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quicksilver
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Quite a few years ago (early 1980's) I had been making some money and bought some shares in a company called "U.S. Electro-Car". They were penny
stocks and they went quite high. I sold off and made some money.
The company had been bought by GM (right when I sold). The electric car that the company had been building was turned into a small vehicle for mines
and hazard areas where Carbon Monoxides, etc were sure to be destructive. The concept vehicle would do 60 MPH and needed a charge that could be
provided by AC current. The vehicle was actually kept from common public consumer sales. This same concept is being sold today! True story!!!
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chief
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The thing is: For all the world full of electro-cars there would be quite an insanely big battery-recycling-industry necessary ...
Meanwhile Methanol may be the solution: Can be made by Fischer-Tropsch-synthesis from a multitude of sources, eg. coal, waste, wood, biomass etc.
==> and can be used in almost any combustion-engine ...
==================
The electric-car trend might not be the solution, but would keep the busines in the family: The _big_ companies which already exist ...
==> ... meanwhile methanol-synthesis could be quite de-centralized ... better for the people, but worse for big-busines and for big-oil
---> ... and maybe thats a main reason for lobbyism and sponsoring to go towards electric cars instead of biofuel ...
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bbartlog
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| Quote: | | Methanol may be the solution: Can be made by Fischer-Tropsch-synthesis ... meanwhile methanol-synthesis could be quite de-centralized
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Yeah, nothing like a backyard-scale syngas and Fischer-Tropsch plant! I can hardly imagine a process *less* suitable in terms of economy and
feasibility at small scale. Nuclear fission, I suppose  . But maybe you were
thinking of methanol from pyrolysis of wood, which has other problems...
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Vogelzang
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Squeeze That Sponge
Nearly two-thirds of crude still gets left in the ground. With enhanced oil recovery, companies are determined to lower that number.
By GUY CHAZAN
Often stymied in their quest for new crude, Western oil companies are squeezing more out of the reserves they already have.
Despite the engineering advances of the past century, nearly two-thirds of crude still gets left in the ground. So oil companies are raising the ante,
investing billions of dollars in cutting-edge technology to increase the amount of crude they can tap.
he potential rewards are huge: Raising the average recovery rate world-wide to 50% from 35% would boost the world's recoverable oil by about 1.2
trillion barrels -- equal to the whole of today's proven reserves, the International Energy Agency says.
"It's the prize for the next half-century," says Howard Mayson, vice president for technology at British oil giant BP PLC, which relies heavily on
enhanced-recovery methods. Among the processes BP uses: flooding reservoirs with polymers that expand like popcorn when they come into contact with
hot rocks, thus flushing more oil out of difficult-to-reach nooks.
Higher Costs
Intense effort and the most advanced brainpower in the oil industry will be required to get at these hard-to-extract hydrocarbons, insiders say. The
Paris-based IEA says it could take more than 20 years to raise recovery to 50%. Yet the global recession has lowered demand for oil, which could deter
some of the investment necessary. Meanwhile, energy prices are higher than they were just a few years ago, making enhanced-recovery methods -- which
are energy-intensive -- more costly. The IEA estimates that the cost of the additional oil is between roughly $20 and $70 per barrel, depending on the
method. Some require fuel to create heat, others involve the production of chemicals.
The benefits of enhanced recovery are cited regularly in the debate about how much oil is left to pump. "Peak oil" theorists believe the world's oil
and gas supplies are fast running out. Champions of enhanced recovery, by contrast, say this isn't so, and point to steady upward revisions in
estimates of the world's recoverable hydrocarbon reserves as the industry invents new ways to pump hard-to-get-at oil.
Enhanced recovery is a lifeline for the biggest oil companies, such as Exxon Mobil Corp. and BP, which are under intense pressure from shareholders to
keep ramping up production and gaining access to fresh reserves. But that's hard to do when the companies are shut out of the oil-rich Middle East and
places like Russia. So they rely more and more on existing fields, some of which have been producing oil already for decades.
"Big Oil is constantly looking for ways to squeeze the sponge, to get the next trillion barrels," says Bob Fryklund, an oil consultant at IHS Inc., a
business information and analysis group based in Englewood, Colo. Some smaller energy companies, too, such as Apache Corp. and Occidental Petroleum
Corp., have carved out niches in this field. "It's their bread and butter," says Mr. Fryklund.
Pumping Gas
One method of improving oil recovery could become a vital weapon against global warming: Some companies are pumping carbon dioxide into reservoirs to
flush more oil out of the ground. The technique could become increasingly attractive as the world seeks to reduce greenhouse gases. Why not put the
carbon dioxide to work, the thinking goes, rather than simply storing it in disused oil reservoirs, as is also done currently.
"It feels like a waste parking it underground when it has a terrific impact on oil recovery," says Mr. Mayson, who was involved in using natural gas
to increase oil production back in the early 1980s as a young reservoir engineer at Prudhoe Bay, on Alaska's North Slope. Prudhoe, a big source of oil
and gas for BP, had been in production just a few years at the time, and presented the company with a problem: what to do with the huge amount of
natural gas being produced along with oil.
In those days, oil companies in many remote parts of the world would simply burn the gas off into the atmosphere while producing the oil. But the BP
team, of which Mr. Mayson was a part, worked to inject the gas back into the reservoir to increase pressure and so boost recovery. BP now injects more
natural gas each day into its Alaskan oil reservoirs than the domestic gas market of the U.K. consumes.
Prudhoe's recovery factor today is expected to be more than 60%, compared with less than 40% when production began in the late 1970s. At the start of
the 1980s, the field was expected to last about 30 years, Mr. Mayson says. Now "there could easily be another 50 years to go," he adds. "It's very
long-legged, and a lot of that is down to technology." Prudhoe's total recoverable reserves are now estimated to be several billion barrels more than
what was envisaged when production started.
Chemicals and other gases, such as nitrogen, have also been used to improve recovery. These additives lower the viscosity, or stickiness, of the oil
and improve its flow rate -- like adding detergent to a greasy saucepan. "It dissolves the oil from the rock face, almost like dry-cleaning it," says
Mr. Mayson.
After the Flood
The oldest and still the most commonly used method of increasing yield is flooding: This involves injecting water into an oil reservoir to maintain
pressure and to sweep oil that is trapped in porous rock structures toward the well. Flooding has been used in the industry for decades. BP now gets
60% of its oil output this way.
One problem with the technique is the injected water can flow into highly permeable layers of rock, known as "thief zones," bypassing much of the oil
in the reservoir. To fix this, BP uses a technology called Bright Water, a process involving a chemical which, when cool, is a tightly bound polymer
particle, but, when exposed to heat, expands tenfold -- like popcorn. When it enters a thief zone, it encounters hot rocks and "pops," plugging up the
zone so that following water will flow elsewhere.
Bright Water was patented in 2002 by Nalco Co., a small Naperville, Ill., specialist provider of chemicals, and developed by BP and Chevron Corp.
Trials began in Alaska in 2004. The process has since been used by BP in Argentina and Pakistan. BP says the additional oil the new technology will
produce over the next 20 years is roughly equivalent to finding a major new field.
Like other companies, BP is also experimenting with microbes that reduce the viscosity of heavy oil and help trapped oil move more freely.
Another new technology: LoSal, a flooding technique that uses water with reduced salinity, unlike the salt water many oil companies use. BP has
discovered that less salinity in the water can improve recovery rates.
Eyes Underground
Meanwhile, real-time monitoring of oil reservoirs helps companies see how effective flooding is and whether there are still pockets of oil that
engineers can go after. The technique is often called 4D, because it not only shows what the reservoir looks like in three dimensions but illustrates
how it changes over time. One company noted for its successful use of 4D is Norway's StatoilHydro ASA. At its Norne field under the North Sea it has
carried out repeated seismic surveys to discover changes in subsurface structures and to monitor flow rates of water, gas and oil in real time. Such
techniques have helped lift the recovery factor at Norne to 52% from 40% and extend the field's life past 2015.
Advanced sensors that indicate pressure, temperature and flow rates in real time are increasingly being installed on equipment. This gives engineers a
live view of how an oil well is performing, and more timely information about how productivity can be improved.
International Business Machines Corp. is one company at the forefront of such techniques. It integrates sensors, accesses and analyzes the information
they provide and makes recommendations based on the data.
Jon Starkebye, regional director of chemicals and petroleum at IBM, says engineers often use production data that's weeks old. That's not as useful as
the "live" data IBM can access, he says.
The advanced sensors allow engineers to "communicate with the reservoir in real time...so they can make the right decisions," he says.
—Mr. Chazan is a staff reporter in the London bureau of The Wall Street Journal.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124050418449248573.html
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Vogelzang
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The World Has Plenty of Oil
By NANSEN G. SALERI
March 4, 2008
Many energy analysts view the ongoing waltz of crude prices with the mystical $100 mark -- notwithstanding the dollar's anemia -- as another sign of
the beginning of the end for the oil era. "[A]t the furthest out, it will be a crisis in 2008 to 2012," declares Matthew Simmons, the most vocal voice
among the "neo-peak-oil" club. Tempering this pessimism only slightly is the viewpoint gaining ground among many industry leaders, who argue that
daily production by 2030 of 100 million barrels will be difficult.
In fact, we are nowhere close to reaching a peak in global oil supplies
Given a set of assumptions, forecasting the peak-oil-point -- defined as the onset of global production decline -- is a relatively trivial problem.
Four primary factors will pinpoint its exact timing. The trivial becomes far more complex because the four factors -- resources in place (how many
barrels initially underground), recovery efficiency (what percentage is ultimately recoverable), rate of consumption, and state of depletion at peak
(how empty is the global tank when decline kicks in) -- are inherently uncertain.
- What are the global resources in place? Estimates vary. But approximately six to eight trillion barrels each for conventional and unconventional oil
resources (shale oil, tar sands, extra heavy oil) represent probable figures -- inclusive of future discoveries. As a matter of context, the globe has
consumed only one out of a grand total of 12 to 16 trillion barrels underground.
- What percentage of global resources is ultimately recoverable? The industry recovers an average of only one out of three barrels of conventional
resources underground and considerably less for the unconventional.
This benchmark, established over the past century, is poised to change upward. Modern science and unfolding technologies will, in all likelihood,
double recovery efficiencies. Even a 10% gain in extraction efficiency on a global scale will unlock 1.2 to 1.6 trillion barrels of extra resources --
an additional 50-year supply at current consumption rates.
The impact of modern oil extraction techniques is already evident across the globe. Abqaiq and Ghawar, two of the flagship oil fields of Saudi Arabia,
are well on their way to recover at least two out of three barrels underground -- in the process raising recovery expectations for the remainder of
the Kingdom's oil assets, which account for one quarter of world reserves.
Are the lessons and successes of Ghawar transferable to the countless struggling fields around the world -- most conspicuously in Venezuela, Mexico,
Iran or the former Soviet Union -- where irreversible declines in production are mistakenly accepted as the norm and in fact fuel the "neo-peak-oil"
alarmism? The answer is a definitive yes.
Hundred-dollar oil will provide a clear incentive for reinvigorating fields and unlocking extra barrels through the use of new technologies. The
consequences for emerging oil-rich regions such as Iraq can be far more rewarding. By 2040 the country's production and reserves might potentially
rival those of Saudi Arabia.
Paradoxically, high crude prices may temporarily mask the inefficiencies of others, which may still remain profitable despite continuing to use
1960-vintage production methods. But modernism will inevitably prevail: The national oil companies that hold over 90% of the earth's conventional oil
endowment will be pressed to adopt new and better technologies.
- What will be the average rate of crude consumption between now and peak oil? Current daily global consumption stands around 86 million barrels, with
projected annual increases ranging from 0% to 2% depending on various economic outlooks. Thus average consumption levels ranging from 90 to 110
million barrels represent a reasonable bracket. Any economic slowdown -- as intimated by the recent tremors in the global equity markets -- will favor
the lower end of this spectrum.
This is not to suggest that global supply capacity will grow steadily unimpeded by bottlenecks -- manpower, access, resource nationalism, legacy
issues, logistical constraints, etc. -- within the energy equation. However, near-term obstacles do not determine the global supply ceiling at 2030 or
2050. Market forces, given the benefit of time and the burgeoning mobility of technology and innovation across borders, will tame transitional
obstacles.
- When will peak oil arrive? This widely accepted tipping point -- 50% of ultimately recoverable resources consumed -- is largely a tribute to King
Hubbert, a distinguished Shell geologist who predicted the peak oil point for the U.S. lower 48 states. While his timing was very good (he forecast
1968 versus 1970 in fact), he underestimated peak daily production (9.5 million barrels actual versus eight million estimated).
But modern extraction methods will undoubtedly stretch Hubbert's "50% assumption," which was based on Sputnik-era technologies. Even a modest shift --
to 55% of recoverable resources consumed -- will delay the onset by 20-25 years.
Where do reasonable assumptions surrounding peak oil lead us? My view, subjective and imprecise, points to a period between 2045 and 2067 as the most
likely outcome.
Cambridge Energy Associates forecasts the global daily liquids production to rise to 115 million barrels by 2017 versus 86 million at present. Instead
of a sharp peak per Hubbert's model, an undulating, multi-decade long plateau production era sets in -- i.e., no sudden-death ending.
The world is not running out of oil anytime soon. A gradual transitioning on the global scale away from a fossil-based energy system may in fact
happen during the 21st century. The root causes, however, will most likely have less to do with lack of supplies and far more with superior
alternatives. The overused observation that "the Stone Age did not end due to a lack of stones" may in fact find its match.
The solutions to global energy needs require an intelligent integration of environmental, geopolitical and technical perspectives each with its own
subsets of complexity. On one of these -- the oil supply component -- the news is positive. Sufficient liquid crude supplies do exist to sustain
production rates at or near 100 million barrels per day almost to the end of this century.
Technology matters. The benefits of scientific advancement observable in the production of better mobile phones, TVs and life-extending
pharmaceuticals will not, somehow, bypass the extraction of usable oil resources. To argue otherwise distracts from a focused debate on what the
correct energy-policy priorities should be, both for the United States and the world community at large.
Mr. Saleri, president and CEO of Quantum Reservoir Impact in Houston, was formerly head of reservoir management for Saudi Aramco.
See all of today's editorials and op-eds, plus video commentary, on Opinion Journal1.
http://online.wsj.com/public/article_print/SB120459389654809...
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